Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a pretty impressive visual package on PC, with its highest “Unobtanium” settings challenging even the beefiest of GPUs, but how does the game fare on consoles? Thankfully, the answer is “pretty darn well!” I can confirm this from my own play testing, but the folks at Digital Foundry has given the game a full analysis on Xbox Series X/S and PS5, and the results are fairly impressive. You can check out their full video below, provided you have around 20 minutes to spare, or you can scroll on down for our rundown of the salient points.
The good news is the Xbox Series X and PS5 versions of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora offer most of the detail and environmental density of the PC game as well as a full suite of ray-tracing features, including ray-traced global illumination and reflections. Granted, the ray tracing isn’t quite as high quality as you’d get on the highest-end PC, but the fact that it’s there at all in a big open-world is a nice surprise.
Both the Xbox Series X and PS5 offer 60fps Performance and 30fps Quality modes. Both these modes are dynamic, with Performance running between 864p and 1260p and Quality running between 1296p and 1800p. Both are then upscaled to 4K with FSR 2. According to DF, the PS5 often runs at a slightly lower resolution within the dynamic range, but Xbox Series X has much more noticeable reconstruction artefacts, perhaps due to a bug in FSR implementation.
As for framerates, in Performance both Xbox Series X and PS5 mostly hover in the 50fps to 60fps range, although they can drop to the mid-40fps range. There doesn’t seem to be a major advantage for either console in Performance mode, although Xbox Series X has some traversal hitching, with the game sometimes stuttering or even pausing for a second as the world loads in the background. As for the Quality mode, as is becoming the norm for AAA games, it’s much more stable than Performance mode, delivering a solid 30fps on both consoles with proper frame timing.
As for the Xbox Series S, you only get a single 30fps mode, which runs between 720p and 1080p natively, but at least that 30fps is solid.
So yeah, I can attest that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a pretty impressive package on consoles. Personally, I actually prefer playing on Quality mode, with its sharper image, higher detail levels, and more consistent performance, but that’s up to you.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is available now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.
